Green Follies in Germany: Lessons for Australia By Richard Miller (London)

Few countries have been under the black magic, or is it green magic spell of the Greens, than Germany. Germany had previously sought to move to a renewable energy economy sooner rather than later, leading Europe. However, since the time of the Ukraine War, the wheels have fallen off the Green dream, as the real test of energy under resource limitation constraints came to be tested, against the backdrop of a brutal winter. Now the Federal Audit Office has issued a crushing report Report on the Implementation of the Energy Transition (2024). The report notes that so-called renewable energy sources like wind and solar are intermittent power sources requiring backups in times of no sunlight, and no wind. Apart from fossil fuels, there are no generally reliable backups.

As well, the renewable energy project only works if such energy can reach consumers, and this requires a massive expansion of the grid. That means 6,000 kilometres more electric cables, and nothing like this is in the pipelines for construction. A very large cost has been made for feel-good ideologies, which have served only to make life and industry more uncertain. Australia if it keeps to the same agenda will face the same unpleasant fate.

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-german-energy-transition-threatens

"The German Bundesrechnungshof, or the Federal Audit Office, is an independent government body charged by statute with overseeing the economic management of the Federal Republic. Last week, they published a devastating "Report … on the implementation of the energy transition" in Germany. Every one of its fifty-eight pages represents a brutal slap in the face to our Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck. German energy policies have not only made us the laughing stock of the developed world; they are deplored even by our own bureaucrats.

The report says clearly what everybody knows but nobody in charge will acknowledge, namely that wind and solar are relentlessly intermittent power sources, which require "a largely redundant" backup system to provide "secure, controllable power" when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. Habeck's much-ballyhooed "power plant strategy," unveiled in February, will "probably not be sufficient" to supply these "secured, controllable backup capacities." This is because the "strategy" plans for a mere half of the capacity that was originally envisioned, because it is not clear whether conditions will be attractive enough to entice any power plant operators, and because nobody can say when the backup will come online. We are transitioning from a functional electricity system into a lot of insubstantial aspirations, which are not the kinds of things that keep the lights on.

Because we have no clear means of countering the intermittency of renewable power sources, it is some comfort that renewable build-out is lagging hopelessly behind schedule. To meet the goal of 80% renewable power by 2030, Germany must install an astounding 7.7 Gigawatts of onshore wind capacity every year for the next seven years. For context, we installed a mere 2.9 GW in 2023. Photovoltaic capacity looks more hopeful; here, we need to increase expansion to 19 GW a year, above the 14.1 GW we installed in 2023. As if in compensation, offshore wind is much worse. To meet these targets, we must increase our installation rate to 3.1 GW every year – an order of magnitude more than the 0.3 GW installed in 2023.

Onshore wind seems to be particularly hopeless. By law, Germany was required to award contracts for 12.84 GW worth of wind turbines in 2023. Only half of these contracts found any takers, which means the balance must be awarded in 2024, in addition to the 10 GW already planned for this year. The Federal Network Agency, in other words, which could contract only 6.38 GW of onshore wind in 2023, must find people to build 16.46 GW this year. One presumes that the backlog will just grow and grow with every passing season.

As everyone knows, renewable capacity is barely half of the story. Wind and solar are no good if the power they generate can't be brought to consumers, and this project requires massive expansions to the electricity grid. Specifically, we need 6,000 kilometres more electrical cables than we have. We've basically never met any of our grid expansion targets; in 2023, we finally got where we'd hoped to be in 2016. The Scholz government is hardly doing any better than the Merkel government in its final years:

All the while, our Green-controlled Federal Network Agency has been telling us that everything is fine. This is because their reports blindly assume that we are expanding our electricity grid and our renewable capacity on schedule. The Economics Ministry thus certifies the security of our electricity according to a fantasy "best-case scenario" that is not only improbable, but contrary to present reality. Remarkably, both the Federal Network Agency and the Economics Ministry "appear to doubt … the validity" of their own excessively optimistic assessments. Thus the Federal Network Agency has said elsewhere that "various scenarios and sensitivities" must be calculated "in order to comprehensively assess the level of supply security," while the Economics Ministry "has accepted that threats to supply security are not recognised in good time and that the need to act is recognised too late." In other words, they provide doctrinaire assurances that everything is fine, and when pressed admit that they're not really sure if any of this will work.

They are also lying about how much this will cost, citing the facile fable that wind and solar energy are "free." The truth, our auditors note, is pretty nearly the opposite:

The Ministry of Economic Affairs argues that only a significant expansion of renewable energy can guarantee a cost-effective electricity supply, in particular because of the low generation cost of renewables. As early as 2022, the Federal Accounting Office criticised the fact that the Ministry does not take account of the costs of the energy transition. These include, for example, the aforementioned grid expansion costs. This creates a false picture of the actual costs of the transition beyond specialist circles. In view of the very high prices, the German government has repeatedly subsidised the costs of energy … It thus recognises that electricity prices would be too high without state intervention. To date, the German government has failed to define what it considers to be an affordable supply of electricity."